Capturing the calamitous tapestry of war

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rick Atkinson left the Washington Post in 1999 “to raise my game, to become a historian and use the longer lens of history” to write about World War II in Western Europe. He didn’t know that it would be 14 years before he typed the final words of The Guns at Last Light, the brilliant,...

The women of Togethersville

There’s just something about the early ’60s: the drinks, the conservatism, the consumerism, the Cold War. And the astronauts. “Mad Men” fans and history buffs alike won’t want to miss a new book about a relatively unexplored aspect of this era: the lives of the astronauts’ wives. NASA encouraged the women to be “thrilled, happy, and proud” of...

Pick yourself up and dust yourself off

In the summer of 2005, Mardi Jo Link’s broken-down life bore no resemblance to the happy-go-lucky farm life she’d wished for—and read about—as a girl. Instead, her marriage has just unraveled, her soon-to-be ex-husband is living across the street, her bank account is “practically uninhabited” and her three sons are confused, angry and sad. Flying in the face...

Rowing for home

Joe Rantz ended up in one of the finest eight-man crews ever to make it to the Olympics largely because he needed a janitor’s job to pay for college. After a poverty-stricken, affection-deprived boyhood, he was trying desperately to earn enough money to get through the University of Washington. Earning a spot on the rowing team guaranteed a part-time campus job. So in 1933, he tried out...

Her own hidden life

Known for translating her observations of people and animals into powerful literary prose, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas now studies her own history in the memoir A Million Years With You.Thomas’ story testifies to the value of curiosity. When she was just 18, she dropped out of college to join an anthropological expedition, headed by her father, to the Kalahari Desert, where they would meet...

The final word on the Hatfields and McCoys

“What!” you gasp with mouth agape. “Another Hatfield-McCoy saga?” Yes, but The Feud attempts to tie up all the loose ends—a monumental task, indeed, since so much of the convoluted story had to be gleaned from second-, third- and fourth-hand accounts (many wreathed in family biases), wildly inaccurate newspaper reports and incomplete public records.To bring some...

Between the lines of Anne Frank's diary

Like millions of American children, I read and reread Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, mesmerized by the journal of her two years spent in hiding from the Nazis. Yet the book always remained somewhat cryptic for my young mind: What exactly was an “annex”? Why did Anne and her sister Margot call their father Pim? If Anne was German, why did she live in Holland?Reading Anne Frank:...

The momentum of the summer of 1776

Decisions made by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and the Continental Army in New England between May and October of 1776 were crucial to everything that happened later in the American Revolution. Members of those groups were committed to what each understood to be independence—or “the Cause,” as it was called—but there was wide disagreement on what independence...

The creation of one's own mythology

Elegant and intense, Rebecca Solnit’s award-winning books and essays chart new terrain in history, memoir, philosophy and activism. The Faraway Nearby continues Solnit’s narrative exploration into new forms of nonfiction prose, resembling most closely her 2006 peregrination A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Solnit’s new excursion is gracefully written, accessible and always...